India-Pakistan

April 03, 2009

Pakistani investigators say India’s external espionage
agency Research and Analysis Wing, better known by its charmingly sinister
acronym RAW, has plans to assassinate the country’s freshly reinstated Supreme
Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. They also say that RAW is collaborating
with Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud to hit targets in Islamabad and
Rawalpindi. The RAW’s motivation: create anarchy in Pakistan.

Let’s accept all of these assertions at their face value for
the sake of argument. Let’s also disregard that they amount to saying that
India wants more anarchy in Pakistan than there already is because of its own
internal sociological fault lines. Let’s also ignore that India has everything
to lose by creating in its immediate neighbor a failed nuclear armed
fundamentalist Islamic state. I know all this is a great deal to overlook for
the sake of argument. Nevertheless, let’s do it.

The notion that anarchy in Pakistan is an end in itself that
the RAW wants is so fantastic that it is amusing. I hold no brief for the
Indian or any espionage agencies. Their existence is a testimony to how
profoundly distrustful human race is of its own. That is a larger philosophical
debate which is as superfluous as it is beyond the scope of this post.

IANS reports quote The News as saying the following:

"Our agencies have intercepted a RAW plan to hit
Rawalpindi and Islamabad by using terrorist elements within Pakistan," The
News Friday quoted an official as saying.

An intelligence report shared with the newspaper by an
interior ministry official "reveals" that Chaudhry's life "is in
danger as RAW wants to target him to cause anarchy in Pakistan", it added.

According to the intelligence report, at least 20 Uzbek
terrorists dispatched by Mehsud "have already reportedly reached
Islamabad" and "would play a key role in this operation".

They are divided in groups and each group has been assigned
a different attack plan, the report said.

"The terrorists may try to capture important buildings
like the Pakistan Secretariat blocks, TV stations, police training centres and
foreign chains of schools," the intelligence report said.

"This time, the attacks could be conducted at four or
five places simultaneously in various areas of the twin-cities of Rawalpindi
and Islamabad. Vigilance is required to counter and curb attacks or terrorist
acts planned by the extremists," the report added.

If true this is a remarkable piece of intelligence
gathering. But to me its undoing lies in the specificity of its details. It seems
almost as if the whole plot is orchestrated with the full knowledge of the
Pakistani intelligence which may let it unfold if only to eventually accuse the
RAW. It is impossible to say what really goes on behind such complex and
intricate plotting and intelligence gathering. It is not as outrageous as it
sounds that the RAW or, for that matter any intelligence agency, particularly
Pakistan’s own Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), would be involved in such
acts.

The reason I find this claim by Pakistani investigators questionable
is because it is inherently self-defeating for India to push the country any
further into chaos than it already is. If the plot flows from a purely
misanthropic motivation, then it is a different story altogether. In that case we have much more to be worried about.

February 12, 2009

In what can only described as a seminal shift Pakistan has
for the first time admitted that the Mumbai terror attacks were partly planned
on its soil.

"This is an individual act, act of individuals or
non-state actors. Their purpose is to create terror for their own motives.
These motives need to be determined. Both India and Pakistan need to work it out,”
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, adding, "A part of the conspiracy has been
done in Pakistan.”

While the admission is remarkable in itself, it is
impossible to say whether it would lead to a fundamental review and reform of the
way terrorism and terror groups are treated in Pakistan. It is vitally
important that India applauds Pakistan for showing the strength to admit to the
terror attack’s Pakistani origin.

Going by Malik’s comments about the full scope of the
investigation it appears that the Pakistani response has been much more than
window dressing. Whether the Pakistani establishment is driven by expediency or
genuine concern for its own stability, Islamabad has at least managed to emerge
from a state of denial about the Mumbai attacks.

Of course, Malik has taken care to see that his comments in
no way mean that any elements of the Pakistani state were involved in the
planning and execution of the attacks. It is well known that the Pakistani
intelligence had fostered the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group widely believed
to be behind the attacks. The LeT is now being viewed by the western
intelligence agencies as second only to Al-Qaeda in its ability to launch
attacks on Western targets.

It would be unrealistic to expect any Pakistani leader to
make a connection between the intelligence agencies and the LeT. From New Delhi’s
standpoint it is crucial that Islamabad takes the investigation of those behind
the Mumbai attacks to its logical end. This offers a great opportunity to purge
the system of those whose aims are clearly in conflict with those of Pakistan’s
civil society.

While it is always possible that out of reasons of
expediency the Pakistani state has decided to throw the Mumbai attackers under
the bus but it would help not to take a cynical view of the admission. Given
the way the establishment is structured and run, even this admission must have
come after a great deal of ferment.

February 02, 2009

The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the prime suspect behind the
Mumbai terror attacks, “represents a threat to regional and global security
second only to al-Qaeda”, respected Indian American expert Ashley J. Tellis has
said in a Congressional testimony.

“ Although LeT is linked in popular perceptions mainly to
the terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, the operations and ideology of this group
transcend the violence directed at the Indian state,” Tellis, Senior Associate
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in his testimony to the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

“Being an Ahl-e Hadith adherent of Sunni Wahabism, LeT seeks
to establish a universal Islamic Caliphate with a special emphasis on realizing
that dream through the gradual recovery of all lands that were once under
Muslim rule,” he said. This strategic objective had made the LeT an ally of
Al-Qaeda, according to Tellis.

The prepared testimony titled “Lessons from Mumbai” said, “The
LeT’s initial focus on Afghanistan is significant because it refutes the common
misapprehension—assiduously fostered since the early 1990s—that the group has
always been a part of the indigenous Kashmiri insurgency. Nothing could be
further from the truth.”

Tellis asserts that the LeT has been since its inception
composed of Pakistani Punjabis. That coupled with its flexible ideology “is
precisely what made it so attractive to the ISI to begin with, because it could
be controlled and directed far more effectively by its Punjabi dominated sponsor,
the Pakistan Army, than any local Kashmiri resistance group.”

In Tellis’s words the LeT comes across as a highly organized
and efficient outfit. “Unlike many of the other indigenous terrorist groups in
South Asia whose command and control structures are casual and often
disorganized, LeT’s organizational structure is hierarchic and precise,
reflecting its purposefulness. Modeled on a military system, LeT is led by a
core leadership centered on the amir, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, and his deputies,
who oversee different aspects of its functional and charitable operations,” he
said.

In the specific context of India, he said the country “has
unfortunately become the “sponge” that protects us all. India’s very proximity to
Pakistan, which has developed into the epicenter of global terrorism during the
last thirty years, has resulted in New Delhi absorbing most of the blows
unleashed by those terrorist groups that treat it as a common enemy along with
Israel, the United States, and the West more generally.

He was critical of India’s response to the many terror
strikes in the past few years. “To the chagrin of its citizens, India has also
turned out to be a terribly soft state neither able to prevent many of the
terrorist acts that have confronted it over the years nor capable of retaliating
effectively against either its terrorist adversaries or their state sponsors in
Pakistan.”

On the question of Kashmir Tellis seemed to be challenging
the view among some in the Obama administration that the resolution of the
Kashmir problem may deprive Pakistan the excuse to continue to pursue policies
of supporting terrorist groups. “The existence of unresolved problems, such as
the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir, has also provided both Pakistani
institutions and their terrorist clients with the excuses necessary to bleed India
to “death by a thousand cuts,” he said.

“But these unsettled disputes remain only excuses: not that they
should not be addressed by New Delhi seriously and with alacrity, there is no
assurance that a satisfactory resolution of these problems will conclusively
eliminate the threat of terrorism facing India and the West more generally’”
Tellis said.

He argued that the LeT’s objectives “go way beyond Kashmir.”
“They seek to destroy what is perhaps the most successful example of a thriving
democracy in the non-Western world, one that has prospered despite the presence
of crushing poverty, incredible diversity, and a relatively short history of
self-rule. India’s existence as a secular and liberal democratic state that
protects political rights and personal freedoms—despite all its failures and
imperfections—thus remains a threat to groups such as LeT, with their narrow,
blighted, and destructive worldviews, as well as to praetorian,
anti-democratic, institutions such as the Pakistan Army and the ISI (Inter
Services Intelligence),’ he said.

February 01, 2009

Dawn of Pakistan reports that Islamabad has scuppered a
parliamentary resolution calling on the Obama administration to include Kashmir
in the mandate of special US envoy Richard Holbrooke.

“The Foreign Office and a federal minister have scuttled a
move for adoption of a resolution in the National Assembly asking US President
Barack Obama to appoint an envoy on Kashmir or include the settlement of the
dispute in the mandate of the US envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the paper
reported Sunday.

“A top official of the Foreign Office blocked the move by
setting aside a joint resolution approved by members from both the sides of the
aisle, and came out with another version, excluding the call for sending a US
envoy on Kashmir,” it added.

Instead the government has proposed a diluted version of the
resolution which says, “This house underscores the importance of peaceful
and just resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. We expect the
international community to play its due role in the early resolution of this
longstanding dispute. And in this context expresses confidence that the new US
administration will, as stated by President Obama, give priority to this
issue.”

The development has significant implications for
India-Pakistan relations. It is not immediately clear what prompted the
government to tone down the resolution but it is not altogether unlikely that
New Delhi’s unhappiness over including Kashmir in Holbrooke’s mandate could
have played a role. Going by the traditional Pakistani approach, it would have
liked Kashmir come under a sharper international scrutiny that was bound to
have happened had President Obama incorporated the dispute in his envoy’s
agenda. It is hard to read Pakistan’s motivations in not pushing for Kashmir’s
inclusion to the extent one would have expected.

One way to look at it is that Pakistan is conscious about
the long-term effects of such an inclusion on bilateral ties. The aftermath of
the November 26 terror attacks on Mumbai and Pakistan’s reluctance to cooperate
have considerably slowed down the momentum towards normalizing relations with India.
Pushing Kashmir onto Holbrooke’s plan would have soured relations even more.

It is tempting to read a change of heart here but then one
has been let down in the past.

January 26, 2009

In a grim reminder of the worsening governance, Pakistan is
being told that it has petroleum reserves to last only six days. This in a
country that sees itself as an important member of the exclusive nuclear weapons
club.

The “dollar constraints” are a reference dwindling foreign exchange reserves.
One hopes that there are people in Pakistan’s ruling elite as well as intelligentsia
who realize these are all troublesome indicators of not having focused on
nation building in the last six decades but instead letting various state
institutions run amuck with their own little fiefdoms that often conflicted
with the overall well being the of the state as a whole.

A wide variety terror groups that Pakistani intelligence
patronized and promoted over the decades have also played a highly damaging
role in setting the country back. It is undeniable that in comparison India has
managed its political, economic, military and intelligence institutions
extraordinarily well.

There is clear recognition in India that Pakistan’s
stability as a nation-state is fundamental to its own future. In 1991 India was
down to $5.8 billion foreign exchange reserves, enough for barely a few weeks’
imports. Rather than sliding into political and economic chaos the country’s
successive leaderships went about systematically rebuilding its strengths. Today
they are in the range of $280 billion after touching a high of $309 billion
about a year ago.

January 07, 2009

The lone surviving Mumbai
attacker Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab is not a stateless phantom after all. Pakistan
has finally owned up that he is indeed a Pakistani national. Viewed from the
prism of assertive denials since the attacks, this ought to be regarded as a hugely
significant development fraught with long-term consequences.

"We have received information from the competent
authority that he's a Pakistani," foreign office spokesman Muhammad Sadiq
told the New Delhi-based wire service IANS. Then forswearing any possible
obligation towards its own citizens Sadiq said Pakistan will not provide any
legal aid to him. "He has done a heinous crime and cannot be provided any
sort of help," he said. That is a bit of a dampener but in the larger
scheme of things it is important that Pakistan has at least owned him up.

There is a distinct possibility that India will now pursue
the origin of the nine other attackers who were killed during the siege. There
have been enough hints dropped that all ten were from Pakistan but there is no
clear word on that yet. Going by the chain of events and the chronology pieced
together by Indian investigators it makes sense that Qasab was part of a group
of people who arrived by sea to Mumbai. It is important that the origin of the
other nine is quickly established if only to strengthen the argument that it
was a carefully plotted operation begun and directed by elements in Pakistan.

I can understand Pakistan’s eagerness to put as much
distance between the attacker and Islamabad but to the extent that they were
Pakistani national the country has clear obligations under the international
law. To say that since Qasab committed heinous crime and hence is not worthy of
any official involvement is disingenuous.

With this admission one safely argue that Pakistan’s quick
dismissal of the dossier provided by India no longer holds ground. If Qasab is
now accepted to be a Pakistani national, then it follows that a lot of what is
contained in the dossier is also credible.

January 06, 2009

Somini Sengupta of The New York Times has a very interesting
story based on the details contained in the dossier that India has provided to
Pakistan about the Mumbai attacks. Going by the NYT report the dossier tries
hard to establish irrefutable links between the attackers and their handlers in
Pakistan.

To some extent the NYT story addresses my misgivings about
the quality of the dossier. However, it appears to have weak spots, which are perfectly
understandable given the nature of the attacks, which a country in pathological
denial mode is bound to exploit. There are references, for instances, to a
bottle of Mountain Dew soda manufactured in Pakistan which was among the materials
found on a trawler used by the terrorists. “It contains photographs of
materials found on the fishing trawler, from a bottle of Mountain Dew soda
packaged in Karachi to pistols that bore the markings of a gun manufacturer in
Peshawar to a Pakistani-made matchbox, detergent powder, and shaving cream,
called “Touchme,” the story says.

Pakistan is entirely capable of countering this saying these
items could have been planted by Indian investigators. If they can disown a
full grown individual like Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, dismissing a bottle of
Mountain Dew or a matchbox would be ridiculously easy.

No one, least of all New Delhi, should be surprised that
Islamabad has dismissed the dossier containing Mumbai evidence as merely
information. It baffles me why any reasonably intelligent person would think
that Pakistan would own up any of the players in the Mumbai attacks. It has
been Pakistan’s state policy to brazen out of such accusations.

Having said that, I have this niggling feeling that India
may not have furnished a carefully laid out dossier which would not only compel
the generally incredulous Pakistani establishment but even rise to the level of
evidence admissible in a court of law. Not having seen the dossier, it would be
unfair to express misgivings about it. But I am merely wondering aloud on the
basis of India’s past record. It is not for a lack of substance that India’s
case goes by default. It is generally a matter of style and the way such
information is packaged that tends to undermine it.

For a state whose natural reflex action is denial, India has
to be even more fastidious in what it presents to Pakistan. At a time when the
country’s is cornered from many different directions and is as close to it has
ever been to being a failed state, one can hardly expect it rulers to admit
that some of their people may have orchestrated the latest strike. If the
Pakistani nation-state was a person, he or she would be showing all signs of passive
aggressive behavior. It is no longer possible to explain it as an occasional
behavioral trait. It now appears to be pathological. Fortunately, Pakistan is
not an individual and still has some institutional corrective ability.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has mounted an
extraordinary attack on Pakistan calling it a “fragile” and “irresponsible” government
which has used terrorism as a state policy. This is by far the most explicit
condemnation from a generally reticent political figure. Whether it resolves
into something more dramatic, say for instance surgical military strikes
against targets in Pakistan, is an open question. It is tempting to deride the
comments as an example of impotent rage that India has been known to express;
potent rage being military strikes of the kind Israel is currently carrying out
in Gaza.

At some level, from a short-term perspective, it might make
sense for India to mete out some matching punishment to those elements that
carried out the Mumbai attacks. The only problem with surgical strikes as a
device to raise the stakes against such future attacks is that they do not
really end anything. The Israel-Gaza conflict is yet another illustration, if
any more illustrations were needed, of the futility of wars. The only way one
can rationalize limited military strikes from time to time as a necessary evil
is to convince oneself that they are a price democracies must pay to defend the
principle of democracy.

I am not sure if any political leadership can tell its
people that in order for them to remain a democracy in the face of the odds as
heavy as India is facing they would have to be ready to pay a recurring price
in blood and treasure. There is no permanent solution to terror other than
fundamentally reforming entire societies, a task which seems beyond the
capacity of most countries in the world.

December 31, 2008

Zahid Hussain, Mathew Rosenberg and Peter Wonacott have
reported in the Wall Street Journal today that Pakistan’s own investigation has
established “substantive links” between the 10 Mumbai terror attackers and the
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Zarar Shah, a top LeT commander arrested by Pakistan, has
reportedly confessed to his group’s involvement in the attack. “He is singing,”
is how a security official quoted by the WSJ describes Shah’s confession. (I love
taking such remarks literally—imagine Zarar Shah actually singing his
confession in a police lock-up with his interrogators providing the chorus. But
I digress.)

Shah’s confession seems to bear out broadly everything that
Indian interrogators have attributed to the lone surviving attacker Mohammad
Ajmal Amir Qasab’s account of the events.

Is it still possible for Pakistan to officially deny that
the attack was planned and mounted from Pakistani soil and by a Pakistani
group? It is always possible to deny anything even in the face of undeniable
evidence. In the past couple of days there has been a clearly perceptible shift in
Pakistan’s approach to the crisis. From complete stonewalling to the disclosure
about Shah’s confession represents an extraordinary turnaround. I am curious to
know what has caused this shift and, more crucially, for what tactical purpose the
interregnum was used behind the curtain of denials.

It is a highly encouraging sign that bits and pieces are
coming out in the media suggesting that not everyone in the Pakistani
establishment is afflicted by denial. The Mumbai attacks offered Pakistan a
great opportunity to purge its security and intelligence institutions of those
sympathetic to the cause espoused by the jihadists. The only way an enduring democratic
society in Pakistan can strike roots is by sharply demarcating boundaries
between the civil society and the military with a clear definition of who is
subservient to whom.

December 30, 2008

Looking at the latest rounds of Israeli pounding from the
prism of India-Pakistan relations throws up some plausible theories.

In a sense the Israeli strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza
have significantly reduced prospects of a conflict in South Asia. While there
is no geopolitical law that prevents many conflagrations to go on
simultaneously around the world, something tells me that the sharpness of the
rhetoric between India and Pakistan has suddenly been blunted. The latest
example and perhaps the most consequential example of this are comments by
Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. He has emphasized the need
to “de-escalate and avoid conflict” with India.

The fact that Kayani’s remarks came during his meeting with
visiting Chinese vice-foreign minister He Yafei give them particular weight. He
was sent by Beijing with the specific purpose of diffusing tensions between
India and Pakistan. If there is one country whose counsel Pakistan’s military
would still pay attention to it is China. There is no way Pakistan can afford
to displease its giant neighbor to its north even as it is needling another
giant neighbor to its east. Unlike India, Pakistan has no emotional baggage of
the past riding its back since 1947 in its relations with China. It is a
strictly utilitarian and guilt-free association. That distance gives Pakistan a
sense of comfort with China. Of course, Beijing has its own geostrategic
reasons to keep Pakistan in check.

Whether or not anyone explicitly acknowledges it either in
India or Pakistan the violence between Israel and Palestine is viewed as a
reminder by the two South Asian neighbors what their own future could look like
were they to persist with the level of animus and distrust that got heightened
after the Mumbai attacks. It is tempting for many hawks in India to applaud
Israel’s “no non-sense” brutality in retaliation against similar brutality from
the other side. The point to remember is that since 1967 Six-Day War we have
seen numerous such tactical military escalations but they have not resolved
anything. It is not my place to offer a solution to this conflict but it is
commonsense to say that killing people from time to time on either side does
not seem to work.